High Performance Computing (HPC) is a computing environment for achieving high speed processing of large-scale scientific computation and numeric computation and is widely used in various fields of study and development.
In addition, Personal Computer (PC) cluster technology is widely used for configuring HPC systems. This technology achieves high-speed computation by parallel processing, in which a plurality of PC nodes is connected to each other over a network, a large amount of calculation is divided, and then the PC nodes work on the calculation simultaneously.
For example, there has been proposed a conventional technique for achieving faster control performance by calculating how many times a high-speed processing function is executable in an idle time during which a slow-speed processing function is not executed and executing the high-speed processing function the calculated number of times at a regular interval.
A proposed technique for achieving low power consumption is to determine whether to perform high-speed processing, according to a data amount, and increase a clock frequency when performing the high-speed processing and decrease the clock frequency otherwise.
Another proposed technique is to change the driving conditions of a processor so as to obtain a processing speed suitable for a program execution state, and when the processor is overheated, change the driving conditions to reduce power consumption.
Please refer to Japanese Patent Laid-open Publications Nos. 08-202548, 05-27867, and 05-297993.
In an HPC system, a PC cluster or a plurality of other devices connected to each other is used to perform high-speed computation, as described above. In the existing HPC systems, however, each device operates at maximum power consumption for a long time, and therefore a plurality of devices may operate at maximum power consumption at the same time.
If this happens, for example, excessive power may be consumed instantaneously in a computing center as a whole, which may cause a power failure, such as power interruption.